The road into Lyman's Mill was a long straight scar through country that had stopped believing in itself long before the mill closed. The pavement was so buckled by pine roots that the truck vibrated at a frequency that made Isaiah's teeth ache, and the ditches on either side were choked with the rusted skeletons of washing machines and the silver-green glitter of broken bottles. The kudzu had been busy here for decades, swallowing whole stands of trees, draping the telephone poles in a green shroud that seemed to pull the wires closer to the earth. It was not yet noon, but the heat had already built to a weight that pressed down on everything, stilling the birds, thickening the air until it felt like breathing through wet cotton.
Reed had grown quieter as they approached the town limits, his eyes moving from the road to the treeline to the rearview mirror in a rhythm that spoke of old habits, old fears. He had not mentioned the newspaper again, and Isaiah had not pressed him. The silence between them had become a third passenger, filling the cab with a pressure that neither man wanted to be the first to break.
"Lyman's Mill," Reed said, gesturing at the sign that marked the city limits. The sign was riddled with bullet holes, the white letters against green so faded that the town's name was barely legible. Someone had spray-painted beneath it: "Nothing Left to Steal."
The town itself emerged from the pines like a body rising from deep water. The main thoroughfare was a four-lane avenue that must have been impressive in the 1960s, lined with brick storefronts and a theater marquee whose letters had long since been removed, leaving only the metal tracks that once held them. The Denim Mill itself dominated the southern horizon, a vast complex of red-brick buildings and smokestacks that had not produced a yard of fabric in twenty-three years but still stood, too expensive to demolish, too contaminated to repurpose. The windows were mostly broken, and from several of the upper floors, kudzu vines cascaded downward like green waterfalls, giving the whole structure the appearance of a Mayan ruin transplanted to the American South.
A few people still lived here. Isaiah saw them as the truck rolled slowly down the avenue: a gaunt woman pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans, a cluster of men sitting on milk crates outside a building with a hand-painted sign reading "Ministry of Faith," a child's bicycle lying on its side in an empty lot, its front wheel still spinning slowly. These were the holdouts, the ones who had either refused to leave or had nowhere else to go, living in the hollowed-out husk of a town like hermit crabs in a discarded shell.
"The records are in the old mill office," Reed said. "There's a safe built into the floor of the manager's bathroom. The clerk who made the copies worked there before he went to prison, and he had the combination memorized. He told me the numbers the week before he died. I've been carrying them in my head for three years."
"And you're sure no one else knows about this?"
"No one alive."
Reed turned the truck off the main avenue onto a side street that ran parallel to the mill's eastern wall. The buildings here were smaller, houses mostly, their yards overgrown with dog fennel and poison ivy. He pulled into the driveway of a house that had burned at some point in the recent past—the roof was gone, the windows empty, the vinyl siding melted into waxy stalactites—and killed the engine.
"We walk from here. The mill office is on the third floor of the administrative building, the one with the water tower on the roof. We get in, get the papers, and get out before dark."
They left the truck hidden behind the burned house and picked their way through the waist-high weeds toward the mill complex. The administrative building was separated from the main factory by a narrow alley where rusted dumpsters overflowed with decades-old fabric scraps, the denim bleached almost white by the sun. A side door hung open on broken hinges, and inside, the darkness was cool and thick with the smell of mold and pigeon droppings.
Reed produced a small flashlight—another object from his apparently bottomless store of hidden resources—and led the way up a stairwell where the steps were littered with fallen ceiling tiles and the husks of dead insects. Their footsteps echoed in the emptiness, a sound that seemed to bounce off the walls and return to them amplified, announcing their presence to anyone who might be listening.
The manager's office was at the end of a long corridor lined with doors whose nameplates had been removed, leaving only rectangles of unfaded wood. The office itself was a large room with a single window overlooking the factory floor, a view that must have once allowed the manager to survey his domain of looms and workers. Now the window showed only a vast, shadowed cavern where pigeons roosted in the steel rafters and rainwater pooled on the concrete floor.
Reed went straight to the bathroom—a small, tiled room with a toilet filled with stagnant water and a mirror so clouded with age that it reflected nothing but fog. He knelt beside the toilet and began working at the tiles with his crowbar, prying them up one by one to reveal a steel safe set flush with the floor.
"This is it," he said. "Give me a minute with the combination."
Isaiah stood in the doorway, watching the corridor. The silence of the mill was oppressive, a weight that seemed to press against his eardrums, and he found himself straining to hear any sound that did not belong—a footstep, a voice, the click of a weapon being cocked. His nerves were wound so tight that when a pigeon suddenly burst from the rafters with a clatter of wings, he nearly cried out.
The safe door swung open with a low groan. Reed reached inside and withdrew a thick manila envelope, the paper yellowed at the edges, the metal clasp rusted shut. He pried it open and checked the contents—a sheaf of photocopied documents, the text too small to read in the dim light but clearly official, covered in letterheads and signatures and the dense, bureaucratic language of corruption.
"We've got them," Reed said. "Now we—"
The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space of the office, a crack that reverberated off the tile and concrete and seemed to come from everywhere at once. Isaiah threw himself to the floor as a second shot punched through the wall above his head, showering him with plaster dust. Reed was already moving, shoving the envelope inside his jumpsuit and scrambling for the door.
"Back stairs!" he shouted. "Now!"
They burst into the corridor and ran, their shoes skidding on the debris-strewn floor. Behind them, heavy boots pounded up the main stairwell, and a voice—deep, calm, terrifying in its lack of urgency—called out: "You boys are a long way from the drainage pipe."
Isaiah recognized the voice even before he saw the man. It was the voice of the prison, the voice of the system, the voice that had spoken to him through the slot in the cooler door and told him that his time had been calculated and found insufficient.
Harlan Royce.
The former warden of Barlow Correctional stood at the end of the corridor, silhouetted against the light from the broken window, a shotgun cradled in his arms like a child. He was older than Isaiah had imagined—seventy at least, his hair white and cropped close to the scalp, his face a network of deep lines and old sun damage—but his eyes were the eyes of a much younger man, cold and sharp and utterly without mercy. Flanking him were two other men, younger, dressed in the khaki uniforms of private security contractors, their hands resting on the pistols at their hips.
"I have to hand it to you, Reed," Royce said, his voice carrying easily through the empty corridor. "I didn't think you'd actually make it this far. The drainage pipe was clever. Killing Finch was... unfortunate, but clever. I'd almost be impressed if you hadn't made one critical mistake."
Reed didn't answer. He was breathing hard, his body tensed for flight, his eyes darting toward the door to the back stairs.
"You assumed I wouldn't be watching Lyman's Mill," Royce continued. "You assumed that a man who built an empire on information wouldn't have sources in every corner of this state. That clerk you mentioned—the one who died of cancer? He had a sister. She still lives in Coldwater. She told me about the records three years ago, when she was trying to buy her brother a transfer to a medical facility. The price was too high, so she never paid, but I've known about this safe ever since. I've been waiting for someone to come for it." He smiled, a thin expression that did not reach his eyes. "I was hoping it would be you."
"Go," Reed whispered to Isaiah. "The back stairs. Now."
They ran. The back stairwell was dark and narrow, the steps slick with mold, and they took them three at a time, their shoulders slamming against the walls at every turn. Gunfire erupted behind them, shotgun pellets tearing through the drywall, and Isaiah felt something hot graze his side—a sting, then a spreading warmth that he knew immediately was blood.
They burst out of a ground-floor exit into the alley behind the administrative building and kept running, weaving between dumpsters and abandoned machinery. Isaiah's side was screaming now, a deep, grinding pain that made every breath a struggle, and he could feel the blood soaking through his jumpsuit in a warm, steady flow.
"There!" Reed pointed toward a drainage culvert at the edge of the mill property, a concrete pipe half-hidden by kudzu. They dove into it, crawling into the darkness as the shouts of Royce's men echoed behind them.
The culvert was smaller than the prison pipe, barely wide enough for their shoulders, and the water flowing through it was cold and foul-smelling. Isaiah collapsed against the curved wall, pressing his hand to his side. His fingers came away slick and red.
"You're hit," Reed said. His voice was flat, clinical, the same tone he had used when talking about the dead clerk.
"I noticed."
"Let me see." Reed tore a strip of fabric from his own jumpsuit and pressed it against the wound. The pressure sent a bolt of pain through Isaiah's entire body, and he bit down on his lip to keep from screaming. "It's a graze, but you're bleeding a lot. We need to get you somewhere I can clean it."
"They'll find us," Isaiah said. "Royce has dogs. I heard them barking when we were running."
"He won't search the culverts tonight. He'll set up a perimeter, wait for us to come out. Royce is patient. He spent twenty-two years waiting for men to make mistakes. He's not going to rush now just because we're in a pipe."
They sat in the darkness for a long time, listening to the faint sounds from outside—the barking of the hounds, the shouts of Royce's men, the occasional crackle of a radio. The water flowed past them in a steady stream, carrying the smell of chemicals and decay, and Isaiah felt his consciousness beginning to fray at the edges, the pain and the blood loss pulling him down into a gray fog.
"Marcus," he said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears, distant and slurred. "I need to know something."
"Not now, Cross. Save your strength."
"In the dormitory. Before I got sent to the hole. There was a fight. Men with shanks. My cousin... my cousin Terrence was in that fight. They said someone told the guards who started it. Someone gave them names. Terrence got sent to segregation, and two weeks later they found him dead in his cell. Natural causes, they said. But there was nothing natural about it."
Reed was silent.
"I didn't think anything of it at the time. But then I saw you in D-dorm, and I remembered. You were in that dormitory too. You got moved to D-dorm right after the fight. Right after Terrence died. And I started to wonder." Isaiah's voice was growing weaker, but the words kept coming, driven by something that felt older and deeper than the pain in his side. "You said you're a survivor. You said you do what you have to do. So I'm asking you, Marcus. Did you tell the guards about my cousin? Did you trade his name for a transfer? Did you kill him the same way you killed Finch—with information instead of a blade?"
The silence stretched out between them, longer this time, filled with the sound of water and distant dogs and the ragged rhythm of Isaiah's breathing.
"Yes," Reed said finally. The word was barely a whisper, but it landed on Isaiah's chest like a stone. "I didn't know they would kill him. I thought they would just put him in segregation, keep him out of the way. The fight was going to happen regardless—I just made sure I wasn't in the middle of it. I gave them the names of the men who were planning it. I gave them Terrence's name because he was one of the organizers. I did it to survive. It's the only thing I've ever done."
Isaiah closed his eyes. The gray fog was thicker now, pulling at him, and he could feel his grip on consciousness slipping. But before he let go, he said the words that had been building in his chest since the moment he saw the newspaper headline.
"You used me the same way. I was your insurance. If they caught us, you could point to me—the man whose cousin you killed, the man who had every reason to want Finch dead. I wasn't your partner. I was your alibi."
Reed didn't deny it. He didn't say anything at all. He just sat there in the darkness, his breathing steady and slow, and let the truth hang between them like smoke.
Outside, the hounds bayed again, closer this time, and the first pale fingers of Royce's searchlights began to probe the edges of the culvert opening.
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